Random post about sleeping.

Seriously. Random thoughts. Expect more oddball posts like this–and shorter ones as well–as I feed less and less personal material to Facebook.

This topic came to mind while I was relocating some stray pillows this morning.

I have piles of throw blankets & pillows in every room of my house except the kitchen and bathroom. And my floors are layered with multiple rugs too. I’d like to attribute this eccentric decorating scheme to personal taste, but no. The blame rests on bad joints & a natural biphasic sleep schedule.

Slight digression for a definition. Biphasic means it’s natural for me to wake up and prowl around in the middle of the night. Sometimes I putter quietly, other times I read, occasionally I will fire up the computer and write. Often enough I just get up from where I fell asleep, brush my teeth etc, and go to bed for a snuggle. In the summertime, I might crawl under the covers for second-sleep after the sky is light and birds are chirping. But that’s normal…for me.

One major problem, discovered early in co-habitating, is that other people don’t sleep the way I do, and they don’t appreciate me waking them up in the middle of the night.

Getting out of bed disturbs Spouseman unless I exert a lot of mental effort to be stealthy about departure. So if I’m in bed with him when I hit my wake-point, I have a choice of 1) lying there getting steadily more awake and annoyed until morning, which is actual insomnia, 2) exerting mental effort and ending up wide awake rather than properly sleepy-peaceful…which leads to insomnia, or 3) disrespecting my partner’s needs by waking him up with my stumbling and fumbling. None of those options appeal.

I can successfully slide into bed in the dark of night while sleepy-active without issue. It’s getting out of bed & out of the room without bouncing off furniture while drowsy–or worse, absentmindedly turning on a light–that causes conflict.

Thus my whole house is sleep-ready. I sleep where I get sleepy, and go to bed at Some Point later. Spouseman has a much more traditional sleep schedule and long ago got used to kissing me goodnight wherever I happen to be drowsing.

I know, I know, all this still doesn’t explain the affection for multiple rugs. That’s where the joints come in.

On bad nights, one hip and the opposite shoulder both act up. This makes side-sleeping on either side uncomfortable without additional support. Solution: pillows! On the worst nights my neck and back also get cranky, and only a hard surface will appease them. The floor! But not a cold, super-hard floor. I need a slightly cushy one. Rugs to the rescue!

Those worst nights are the ones when Spouseman will come up from gaming on his way to bed & find me curled up in a happy blanket nest in front of the coffee table with the cat sprawled out all over the couch above me.

It never fails to entertain him.

There it is. More than anyone needed to know. I was just in an over-sharing mood.